August 25 – The first of six articles on discoveries of living creatures on the moon supposedly made by Herschel and a fictitious companion named Dr. Andrew Grant is published in the New York Sun. This incident is now known as the Great Moon Hoax.

Adolphe Quetelet publishes Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale (translated as Treatise on Man), outlining his theory of "social physics" and describing his concept of the "average man" (l'homme moyen) who is characterized by the mean values of measured variables that follow a normal distribution.[3]